Payment transaction processing systems, like other electronic data processing systems, are susceptible to fraud. Such fraud can cause problems to users of such systems, often compromising sensitive information and promoting distrust of such systems. Such fraud also imposes additional costs on the entities dependent on the system, such as banks, credit card companies, online retail stores, etc. who bear the brunt of the fraud. Although fraud detection and prevention mechanisms are in place, improvements to the security of such systems pay for themselves by preventing additional fraudulent practices.
If a user typically shops in a particular area, a purchase several thousand miles away can flag the system to a possible fraudulent transaction. Similarly, if the user typically uses a credit card only for gasoline purchases, if the card is used to purchase an expensive plasma screen TV, the transaction can again flag the system. In general, modern systems use various data points to develop a trustworthiness score for the transaction.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,629,981 (Nerlikar) discloses a system and method of attaching transaction location information to a secure transaction, but this information is not used in authenticating a user to access the system to enter the secure transaction. Nerlikar relies exclusively on a RFID tag to determine location. Nerlikar teaches transmission of a transaction with authenticated receipt based on location, but not authenticating a user based on correlation of locations of previous transactions.
U.S. Published Patent Application No. 2006/0253894 (Bookman et. al.) discloses a secure mobile computing platform which bases authentication on a selected trust model, but does not authenticate a user based on correlation with previous times and locations of transactions.
U.S. Published Patent Application No. 2007/0174082 (Singh) discloses an authentication system and method which uses location data to generate a location score providing a confidence value for authentication. There is no mention of a combination of time and location data correlated with a history stored on an application server and a transaction client.